THE AUTHOR APOSTROPHIZES SOME OF HIS FAIR READERS; LOOKS FARTHER THAN THEY ARE LIKELY TO DO, AND GIVES THEM A JUST THOUGH MELANCHOLY EXHORTATION TO BE CHEERFUL WHILE THEY MAY.
Hark how the birds do sing,
And woods do ring!
All creatures have their joy, and Man hath his:
Yet if we rightly measure,
Man's joy and pleasure
Rather hereafter, than in present is.
HERBERT.
Bertha, Arabella, Sarah, Mary, Caroline, Dorothea, Elizabeth, Kate, Susan,—how many answer to these names, each thinking that peradventure she may be the individual especially addressed—
Alcun' è che risponde a chi nol chiama;1
you are looking with impatience for Deborah's wedding day, and are ready to inveigh against me for not immediately proceeding to that part of my story. Well has Sir William Davenant said,
Slow seems their speed whose thoughts before them run;
but it is true in one sense as applied to you, and in another as applied to myself. To you my progress appears slow because you are eager to arrive at what, rightly considering it the most important point upon the whole journey of life, you may perhaps expect to prove the most interesting in this volume. Your thoughts have sped forward to that point and no farther. Mine travel beyond it, and this, were there no other motive, would retard me now. You are thinking of the bride and bridegroom, and the bridesmaid, and the breakfast at the vicarage, and the wedding dinner at the Grange, and the Doncaster bells which rung that day to the Doctor's ears the happiest peal that ever saluted them, from St. George's tower. My thoughts are of a different complexion; for where now are the joys and the sorrows of that day, and where are all those by whom they were partaken! The elder Allisons have long since been gathered to their fathers. Betsey and her husband (whom at that day she had never seen) are inhabitants of a distant church-yard. Mr. Bacon's mortal part has mouldered in the same grave with Margaret's. The Doctor has been laid beside them; and thither his aged widow Deborah was long ago brought home, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
1 PETRARCH.